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Millon was born in 1928, the only child of immigrant Jewish parents from Lithuania and Poland.[1] His 19th-century ancestors came from the town of Valozhyn, then a part of the Russian Empire.[2]:309 Receiving degrees from both American and European universities, he was a member of the board of trustees of Allentown State Hospital, a large Pennsylvania psychiatric hospital for 15 years.[3] Shortly thereafter he became the founding editor of the Journal of Personality Disorders and the inaugural president of the International Society for the Study of Personality Disorders. He is Professor Emeritus at Harvard Medical School and the University of Miami.[4]

The American Psychological Foundation presents an award named after Millon, known as the "Theodore Millon Award in Personality Psychology," to honor outstanding psychologists engaged in "advancing the science of personality psychology including the areas of personology, personality theory, personality disorders, and personality measurement."[6]

Among other diagnoses, Millon advocated for an expanded version of passive aggressive personality disorder, which he termed 'negativistic' personality disorder and argued could be diagnosed by criteria such as "expresses envy and resentment toward those apparently more fortunate" and "claims to be luckless, ill-starred, and jinxed in life; personal content is more a matter of whining and grumbling than of feeling forlorn and despairing" (APA, 1991, R17). Passive-Aggressive Personality Disorder was expanded somewhat as an official diagnosis in the DSM-III-R but then relegated to the appendix of DSM-IV, tentatively renamed 'Passive-Aggressive (Negativistic) Personality Disorder'.[7]